All credit for this goes to hongkiat.com, I’m simply re-posting because I find this to be extremely useful, and like to note stuff like this on my own blog.

Although recognizable, the Feedburner chicklet that displays the number of subscribers is ehh.  I’d much rather be able to stylize the number itself and fit it into my own design.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you can pull the number out of the chicklet and do whatever you want?  You can, and it’s extremely easy!  You can see I just implemented this on the sidebar on Carbon Fiber Gear:

Of course that number can be styled however you want it using CSS.  So how do you get it?  Simply put this code somewhere in your Wordpress template (Mine is in sidebar.php), and make sure to replace the “feedburnerid” with your ID in the $whaturl line:

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<?
	//get cool feedburner count
	$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburnerid";
 
	//Initialize the Curl session
	$ch = curl_init();
 
	//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
 
	//Set the URL
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
 
	//Execute the fetch
	$data = curl_exec($ch);
 
	//Close the connection
	curl_close($ch);
	$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
	$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
	//end get cool feedburner count
 
	// Use $fb to print out the number of subscribers
	echo 'Join the <i>' . $fb . '</i> subscribers';
?>

You’ll need to make sure the feed count service is activated. To do that, login to your Feedburner account, hit the “Publicize” tab, and then go to to Feed Count. On this page you’ll need to activate the service. There you have it!

Recently, I jumped on the Flickr bandwagon, and signed up for a pro account.  $24.95 a year, and it offers you unlimited photo and video upload, plus all of the great community benefits of being a part of Flickr.  It’s a great service, with a great community, at a great price.  I was using my Flickr account for my personal/business use, I setup the name under dpitMedia (which is my parent company).  I created a few collections of sets that made sense for each site I had.

The collection for Carbon Fiber Gear had a bunch of stuff in it, including the pictures of products we sell that I had personally taken.  In the descriptions to each product I would just put that it was available on my site, and I linked to it.  I’ve seen this done a million times on Flickr, find any company that posts pictures of their products, and they’ll more than likely have a link to their site…or bloggers, that have a link to their blog.

So I probably had around 1,000 pictures in my account, and out of that, maybe 50 or less were pictures of the products that I took with a link in the description.  One day I login to my account, and it won’t work.  I try to access my photostream, and it just says “dpit Media is no longer active on Flickr”.  I had no idea, why, so I tried to contact Flickr to find out what happened.  I sent a message on the contact form to find out what happened (Flickr doesn’t have a phone number listed anywhere, so I was forced to e-mail).  This was the response I got:

Hello,

Thank you for contacting Flickr Customer Care.

Flickr account “dpit Media” was deleted by Flickr staff for violating our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.

www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

Flickr reserves the right to terminate your account without warning at any time.

Regards,
Do

That’s it.  There was nothing about what had actually been done, no information on if I was going to get refunded, etc.  I went through the Flickr guidelines link Do sent, and could only find one thing that could potentially be the reason why my account was terminated:

Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes.
Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr technologies (including APIs, FlickrMail, etc), or Flickr accounts must be approved by Flickr. For more information on leveraging Flickr APIs, please see our Services page. If you have other open questions about commercial usage of Flickr, please feel free to contact us.

Some of the pictures I had could have been borderline selling a product, because I posted a link to where you can actually get the product…but I don’t know if that’s what they really mean by that term.  If I post a picture of a Nissan Maxima, and then put a link to Nissan’s product page, am I violating the terms?   I could easily find 10 examples without trying that would technically break that term…but is it enough, or even what they mean, to actually terminate an account?  I would think they are just protecting themselves against obvious spammers, not somebody who very obviously is not spamming.

So I sent an e-mail back:

Hi Do,

I’m assuming it was terminated due to using it for commercial purposes…as I had some sets in one of the collections that were linking to the product that it was a picture of.

I apologize, and must have overlooked that clause in the terms when signing up. I wish that Flickr had at least sent a warning (even though I understand you reserve the right to terminate the account at any time), I would have simply removed the link to the product in those pictures. Out of maybe the 1,000 or pictures I had, I would say that 50 of them were like that.

Is there anything I can do to have my account reinstated? Now that I understand this term, it will surely not be broken on my end again. I had just upgraded to a pro account, I really loved being a part of the Flickr community, and I’d hate to lose that over a small overlooking on my end. I had been promoting my pictures from my own personal blog, and had no intention of violating any terms.

Let me know if there is anything that can be done. At the very least, am I getting a prorated refund of what I paid? I would much prefer to be able to continue to be a part of the Flickr community, and will not violate any of the terms going forward, it was an honest mistake on my part.

Thanks,
Dave

It has now been 48 hours, and I have yet to get a response from “Do”.  At the very least I have a right to understand why my account was terminated right?  I never got a warning from Flickr saying “hey, you’re violating our terms on some of your pictures, you’ll need to fix this or we’ll have to delete your account”.  Nope, they just deleted the account.  That doesn’t seem like a very good way to retain customers, or provide good customer relations/service.  Last I heard in the market news, Yahoo wasn’t exactly in the position to just throw money away.

Last week, my credit card bill came in, and the charge for setting up Flickr had a toll free phone number next to it (866-562-7228 for those that want it).  I gave it a call, and it actually goes to what I guess is Yahoo paid services billing support.  I get somebody on the line and explain my situation.  The guy basically tells me that there is no notes on my account to show why it was deleted, but that once it’s deleted, it’s gone forever (makes sense from a privacy perspective…sucks for me though).  If I wanted to know why it was terminated, I’d have to e-mail back (which I did, and have yet to get a response).  He was also able to give me a refund (100%).  He recommended I find out why I got terminated, and setup a new account, and don’t do whatever I did wrong again.

So I setup a new account (find me here, and friend me!), and started to setup all the pictures again.  It’s not going to be as much as I had before, but it’s a work in progress.  Really sucks from my part because I spent a lot of time getting everything right, tagging hundreds of pictures, adding descriptions, etc.  Yahoo/Flickr, please make sure and tell me if I’m doing some sort of minor break of your terms, and give me an opportunity to resolve it before just going out and deleting it.  If Flickr wasn’t so awesome, you’d have lost me a customer…but because your service is so good, you have another chance.

Anybody else have similar stories?  Doesn’t necessarily have to be Flickr.

One of things has always been to have a killer garage…and that always starts off with cool floors in my opinion. I recently bought a new house (I’ll have some sort of tour post in the future sometime), and it’s now giving me an opportunity to build my dream garage. Stage 1 of course is flooring.

While I was at SEMA back in November, I stopped at one of the booths for RaceDeck, a company that manufacturers garage floor tiles.  They had a great show special, and the final cost would end up being a lot less than if I were to order it myself…so even though I wasn’t necessarily ready to buy, they lured me in.  I’m glad I did.  Installation was a breeze, and the floor looks amazing!  Once the garage is all painted and lighted up, it will look that much better.  Here’s a little picture timeline of the install:

Here’s all the tiles ready to be installed:

Move all your stuff to one side:

Here we can see I’m getting started:

Then I realized I should probably start from the corner:

It’s growing!

The most time consuming part was definitely the checkered area, but still not too bad:

Repeat on the other side, and then done!

Of course here’s a pic with my baby in it:

You can order the floor through RaceDeck, as well as design what you want…they have a pretty good designer on their website that will tell you exactly how many tiles of each color you’ll need to order to match your design.  By the way, if you’re thinking that RaceDeck paid me to write this, or I benefit in any way, I am not/don’t.  Just providing a good testimonial for an awesome product and a company that gave me good service.

If you think Apple successfully revolutionized music and the cell phone, you haven’t seen anything yet. Check out the new MacBook wheel:

For those that don’t know, the Onion News Network is fake news. Also, if you have yet to see the iRaq, this is worth seeing:

Hopefully some of you out there reading this are techies and can suggest a solution for me.  I’m putting a 37″ LCD in my office, and I’d like to optionally be able extend my desktop onto it.  The problem is that I am already running two monitors using both DVI ports on my Foxconn 512MB GeForce 7950GT video card.  So there are two solutions, one being better than the other that I’d like to figure out the best and most cost effective way to figure out.

1) This is the most optimal solution.  I’d like to add a third monitor and be able to extend my desktop onto it.

2) If I can’t do the above, or it’s not cost effective, I wouldn’t mind just having a copy of the 2nd monitor on the 3rd screen.  So whatever is showing up on my 2nd monitor, is also identically showing up on the 3rd.

I’m assuming the way to do this is to get another video card in order to obtain another output.  If so, does it have to be the same card (I can run them in SLI mode)?  Or can I pick something cheap up?  If it has to be the same card, I’m worried about power consumption and heat.  I have an Shuttle XPC case, which is a small-form factor case.  It’s extremely tiny, and not sure if it can handle the heat or power of a 2nd powerful video card.  Here’s my specs that you may need:

• Shuttle XPC SD37-P2-BK-V1 case/motherboard/power supply
• Foxconn FV-N79GM3D2-HP video card

Any thoughts?  Post your comments below.

With Ford no longer owning Jaguar, Range Rover, or Aston Martin, its only luxury brands to concentrate on are Volvo and Lincoln. They still make Lincolns? That’s what I thought, until I had the opportunity to get a few minutes with the 2009 MKS at Ford’s upcoming model event back in August.  I was impressed enough with the car there that I decided to get one into the garage for a full fledged review.

Ford sent over an essentially fully loaded all wheel drive model that had a sticker price around $47,000.  For reference, the AWD model starts at $39,590.  Optional equipment which was about $6,700 sticker price included the following:

• Technology package
• Navigation Package
• 19″ wheels
• Rain sensitive windshield wipers
• Dual panel moonroof
• Adaptive headlamps with auto high beam
• Forward sensing system
• Voice activated nav system
• Intelligent access key with push button start
• Rear view camera
• THX-II certified audio system with 5.1 surround sound
• Ultimate leather seating
• Adaptive cruise control

The 09 version of the MKS is built on the same platform as the Taurus/Sable/Taurus X and Flex, so you can kind of call it a pimped out Taurus.  Under the hood you’ll find a 3.7-liter V6 that provides a decent 270hp and 256 ft-lbs of torque.  The MKS is a bit of a fatty, weighing in at 4,127lbs, so it wouldn’t hurt to have slightly more power.  With the bigger V6 making all that weight move, I was averaging about 19mpg…one of my only bigger complaints about the car.  Then again, gas prices are down, and if you’re spending almost $50,000 on a luxury vehicle, how much do you care about spending a little more money on gas.  The MKS does allow you to use a lower-grade gas in the car if you don’t mind it not performing optimally.

One big thing to keep in mind is that Lincoln is working on an EcoBoost version of the MKS which will supposedly feature a twin-turbo V6 with some of the hp estimates coming in around 350.  While the car does move, enough to not really complain, it will really move with the additional ponies…and maybe even have better gas mileage.  Even a 4-cylinder EcoBoost motor that makes similar power to the current model, but increases the gas mileage would be a welcome option.

Now that we’ve looked under the hood, lets talk about how the car is dressed.  My personal opinion is that Lincoln did a fantastic job at designing this car.  The split grille, which is the new Lincoln “look” is elegant and along with the nicely shaped headlights, give the Lincoln a very classy yet sporty/aggressive look.  It screams luxury, but with a little muscle.

What I like best though is the rear of the car.  The new vertical LED taillights and generally shape remind me of the Maserati Quattroporte…but better looking.  While the overall design is not revolutionary, it does stand out as a handsome car in a sea of blandness.

The interior of the car is the best part of the MKS hands down.  I was pleasantly surprised how nice all of the materials were, how comfortable the car was, and how ridiculously great the technology was integrated.  One of the greatest steps that Ford has made with their lineup has been the integration of SYNC, a car operating system if you will, developed in conjunction with Microsoft.  The added Sirius satellite radio with Travel Link allows you to do some really cool things like auto re-route your destination based on traffic, find the lowest fuel prices in your area, check sports scores and movie listings, and more.  The voice activation feature to tie it all in works practically flawlessly, and is by far the best system I’ve ever used.

If you read the list of optional items that were included in the car, you need to know that everything other than the adaptive cruise control was part of the $5,715 “ultimate package”…and I wouldn’t buy the car without it.  There is just too much cool, convenient stuff to not shell out for it.  Take for example the 5.1 THX-II certified audio system.  For audio cds that support it, you will be extremely impressed by the quality of the sound.

In regards to handling, I was pleasantly surprised to how well the MKS stuck to the road.  While the car looks smaller than it is, it sits fairly high, especially at the rear.  I’ll be honest, I was expecting a good amount of body roll.  What I did find though was that I could take an exit ramp going 60 with no problems.  I was also a little surprised at how much of the road I could feel, I mean it is a Lincoln right?  I think this mostly had to do with the 19″ wheels that also provided a lower profile tire.  Note that there is also an option for a 20″ wheel.  While I did feel some of the road, the car was almost eerily quiet when driving.  It was so smooth accelerating and shifting through gears.  I had passengers in both the front and rear of the car, all complimenting the MKS on how incredibly smooth and comfortable the car was.

Speaking of comfortableness, the MKS definitely sticks to what you would imagine a Lincoln would be…notably comfortable.  My rear passengers were pleased and with no complaints, they were happy about their rear heat warmers in the 30 degree rainy weather we were in.

The Lincoln MKS puts itself into a class of heavy competition.  With cars like the BMW 5-Series, Jaguar XF, Cadillac CTS/STS, Acura RL, Lexus GS, etc…it’s tough to come out as number one.  What Lincoln does have going over the competition is the pricepoint.  A fully loaded MKS will come in lower than most of the competition, but I still think it’s priced a little high.  The initial reaction I was getting from most people was surprised when they found out how much it costs.  While it’s a nice car, they really need to undercut the competition.  I’d like to see a fully loaded AWD model come in at the lower $40,000 range if it’s possible.  In reality though, it is a great buy for what it is…which is why it was nominated for car of the year from Motor Trend.

For more pictures, as well as the high resolution versions, see the Flickr set.

I want to start this post off by saying that I am wrong, the issue of not having myself protected is my fault.  What I do want to state though is that PayPal should make this issue that I had more apparent to its customers that receive payments for a product valued over $250.

On July 31st ActiveTuning received an order for an RGB2+ for $325 shipped.  This is not a product that we normally stock (we state this on the product page, and also state that it will take about a week before it’s shipped to the customer), so once an order arrives, we place an order with our supplier, who then ships it to us, and we ship it to the customer.  We shipped a few days later, within PayPal’s 7 day terms.

Almost 3 months later, on November 28th, I received a notice that the funds were on hold due to a chargeback.  PayPal asked for the tracking #, in which I gave to them right that day.  The tracking # confirmed delivery of the unit to the customer.  Two weeks later on December 12th, I receive an e-mail from PayPal stating that the funds cannot be returned, the customer won the chargeback settlement, sorry….and I’m responsible for the $10 chargeback fee.  From my perspective as the business I did everything correct.  I received an order and I shipped as soon as possible.  I used USPS Priority Mail, as PayPal heavily promotes and integrates into their service.  This was not fair to me.

I immediately called PayPal, and after looking into it, they directed me to the third bullet of section 11.7 of their twenty five page user agreement.  Under the definiteion of “proof of delivery” it states the following:

Signature Confirmation for transactions that total $ 250 USD or more (see Foreign Currency Equivalents below).

While I did get delivery confirmation on the package, I did not get signature confirmation.  Since I did not get this, I automatically lose the chargeback case.  Yes, this is in the 25 page user agreement, but sorry PayPal, I can’t memorize or read every single thing.  This is a pretty important aspect of seller protection in my opinion, especially on higher priced items (anything over $250).  Would it be that difficult to “promote” this term/clause a little better to protect their own customers (the sellers that generate a huge amount of sales in which they make money through transaction fees and monthly service agreements)?  A simple obvious note when receiving a payment over $250 for a good that says “hey, don’t forget to add signature confirmation so you don’t get fucked when your customer scams on you”.

That is all.

I had been following the development pictures of the next generation Nissan Z for years, and finally official information was released.  The car looked promising in pictures, but I wasn’t 100% sure…I had to see it in person.  Luckily, Nissan’s Follow The Z Tour came by my neck of the hoods and gave me the opportunity to see the car in person.  Like the new Maxima, when pictures were released I was somewhat weary about how it would look in person.  When I finally saw it, I thought it was drop dead gorgeous, 100 times better than the media circulating around.  I was hoping the new Z would be the same.

After seeing the new 370Z, I can honestly say that I’m not dissapointed.  I didn’t get the same “oh my god” reaction I got with the Maxima, but it does look much better in person than in pictures.  It gives off a much more aggressive look with it’s edgier lines than previous models, something I really love about it.  The new headlights are to die for, and the car just looks all around cleaner.  The interior has been hugely improved, and there is a lot more cargo space due to no more rear strut bar in the way.

There were two models at the event, a blue and yellow.  I obvioulsy was only able to look at the cars, but I’d be dying to drive one around for a bit and see how it has improved (hint hint Nissan )

Nissan did a really nice job with the car, it has already grown on me tenfold from first seeing it.  I look forward to getting behind the wheel of one in the near future and giving my opinion of that as well.  Here’s a little video I did from the event, also, to see all the pictures (including in high-res) see the flickr set here.

Once upon a time, two Vipers and Corvette ago, I had a 2004 Nissan 350Z which was my garage queen project car. This car was my pride and joy, I put a lot of time, effort, and money into that car to make it the way I wanted. I thought it’d be interesting to go back and see all of the things I had done to the car to turn it from this:

To this:

My initial idea was that I wanted to make the car nice overall from all aspects…from performance, to suspension, to audio. Looking back now, the one aspect I didn’t really do enough was suspension, but that would have required dumping in a lot more money. So let’s take a look at what was done:

To start off, I went with some little modifications like a smaller antenna, removing emblems, and intake, etc. The original plan was keep the car naturally aspirated (meaning all-motor with no sort of forced induction like a turbo or a supercharger), which is why I got the intake. That changed over time, but we’ll get to that later.

I also wanted to have a carbon fiber/orange theme, I always thought that the orange matched a gunmetal sort of color really well. To kick that theme off, I installed a JIC front strut tower brace for tighter handling and a nice look under the hood. I also installed 15% tint all-around to give it a more refined orange/black look.

Next, I installed RS*R springs. This lowered the car slightly to give it a more aggressive stance, and help improve handling slightly. You can see the height difference in the springs here:

In the meantime, I was prepping for a show quality audio system installation by starting to amass parts for that:

We can see here I went with Polk/Momo amplifiers, and Inifity Kappa Perfect speakers/subs, along with a Pioneer Elite headunit which isn’t shown.

Continue Reading »

Not too long ago Lamborghini updated their Gallardo model with the new LP560-4. Why the name? LP stands for “longitudinal poseriore” because of the rear longitudinal engine position. The 560 part of the name represents the amount of horsepower that the 5.2L V10 pumps out. -4 represents 4 wheel drive. Congratulations, consider yourself a Lamborghini Gallardo naming expert!

I ran over to Lamborghini Washington for a first hand look at the new supercar. They had two in the inventory, one in white, and the other in a semi-dark silver:

Thinking of picking one up?? The silver one will run you about $265,000:

Lamborghini has a habit of doing this. They design a car that I look at and fall in love with. I can’t even begin to fathom how the design can be improved, but then they redesign, and it looks even better. Most notably to me the major improvements are on the front and rear parts of the car. The frontend has a new, more aggressive looking bumper with larger openings. It looks more like their super duper car, the $1.6 million Reventon. Along with the redesigned headlights, it makes the new rendition much angrier looking.

More importantly the rear of the car has been completely redesigned. I would say that the rear of the first Gallardo was the one part of the car that a lot of people didn’t like so much. Obviously Lamborghini heard this too, and redesigned accordingly. The new rear is much cleaner:

The updated lower profile taillights and the quad exhaust tips really do the majority of the improvements for me.

Here’s some more pictures that I took for you to enjoy:

Here’s a couple that were hooked up that I saw at SEMA in Las Vegas: